AMD lands Meta as customer and takes on Nvidia, sending shares up 11%
https://www.reuters.com/technology/amd-lands-meta-customer-takes-aim-nvidia-with-new-supercomputing-chips-2021-11-08/

taken on November 2, 2021. REUTERS/Dado Ruvic/Illustration/File Photo

Nov 8 (Reuters) – Advanced Micro Devices Inc (AMD.O) on Monday said it has won Meta Platforms Inc (FB.O) as a data center chip customer, sending AMD shares up more than 11%as it cemented some of its gains against Intel Corp (INTC.O).

It also announced a range of new chips aimed at taking on larger rivals such as Nvidia Corp (NVDA.O) in supercomputing markets, as well as smaller competitors, including Ampere Computing in the cloud computing market.

n taken on November 2, 2021. REUTERS/Dado Ruvic/Illustration/File Photo

Nov 8 (Reuters) – Advanced Micro Devices Inc (AMD.O) on Monday said it has won Meta Platforms Inc (FB.O) as a data center chip customer, sending AMD shares up more than 11%as it cemented some of its gains against Intel Corp (INTC.O).

It also announced a range of new chips aimed at taking on larger rivals such as Nvidia Corp (NVDA.O) in supercomputing markets, as well as smaller competitors, including Ampere Computing in the cloud computing market.

After years of trailing the much larger Intel in the market for x86 processor chips, AMD has steadily gained market share since 2017, when a comeback plan spearheaded by Chief Executive Lisa Su put the company on a course to its present position of having faster chips than Intel’s.

AMD now has nearly a quarter of the market for x86 chips, according to Mercury Research.

The company contends that rack-scale servers are 100% higher in deployment density and 10 times higher in delivery efficiency than traditional servers.

Today, we are happy to announce the initial release of our Facebook open switching system (code-named “FBOSS”) project on GitHub and our proposed contribution of the specification for our top-of-rack switch (code-named “Wedge”) to the OCP networking project.

The initial FBOSS release consists primarily of the FBOSS agent, a daemon that programs and controls the ASIC. This process runs on each switch and manages the hardware forwarding ASIC. It receives information via configuration files and thrift APIs and then programs the correct forwarding and routing entries into the chip. It also processes packets from the ASIC that are destined to the switch itself, such as control plane protocol traffic, and other packets that cannot be processed solely in hardware.

Our Wedge top-of-rack switch follows this basic design and uses a single Broadcom Trident II ASIC for high-speed forwarding.

When you’re a company the size of Facebook with more than two billion users on millions of servers, running thousands of configuration changes every day involving trillions of configuration checks, as you can imagine, configuration is kind of a big deal. As with most things with Facebook, they face scale problems few companies have to deal and often reach the limits of mere mortal tools.

To solve their unique issues, the company developed a new configuration delivery process called Location Aware Delivery or LAD for short. Before developing LAD, the company had been using an open source tool called Zoo Keeper to distribute configuration data

Business Sweden said Facebook has announced plans to expand its Luleå, Sweden campus to over 100,000 m2 (1 million square feet) with the addition of a third data center (news confirmed via the Luleå campus’s very own Facebook page). The nearly 50,000 m2 data center will be operational in 2021, says Business Sweden.

In 2011, Facebook established the data center in Sweden. Facebook has invested $1.2 U.S. billion in the Luleå data center since then, says Business Sweden.

It’s official: Facebook will be investing $1 billion in a new data center in Henrico County, which is just outside Richmond, Virginia. According to CNNMoney, Facebook is putting $750 million into construction and $250 million to multiple solar facilities that will power the data center.

Facebook invests $1 billion in Virginia
http://money.cnn.com/2017/10/05/technology/facebook-data-center-virginia/index.html

Two conflicting goals are emerging inside of data centers—speed at any cost, and the ability to extend hardware well beyond its expected lifetime to amortize that cost.

Layered across both of those are concerns about how to move data back and forth more efficiently, how to secure it, and how to best integrate different generations of technology. But these widely different goals have created headaches for data centers, and opportunities for a surprisingly wide swath of new technology, particularly on the hardware side.

Much of this was in full view at the Open Compute Project Summit last month, where silicon and hardware innovations were the key focus. On the raw performance side, Nvidia showed off its internally built NVlink interconnect fabric, which supports hyperscale computing based on massively parallel GPUs. Nvidia isn’t contributing NVlink to OCP, but it is tapping into the group’s focus on the need for faster movement of data for the most compute-intensive tasks.

“Of the big cloud vendors, there are four in the world that really matter—Microsoft, Google, Amazon, and Alibaba [of China],” says Rob Ober, CTO of Nvidia’s Accelerated Computing group. “Two of the four showed platforms with our Tesla GPUs at the Open Compute conference.”

Today, at the 2017 Open Compute Project U.S. Summit, Microsoft unveiled some significant announcements around their hyperscale cloud hardware design, which they first announced in November as Project Olympus. With the explosion of growth in cloud computing, Microsoft is hoping to reduce the costs of their Azure expansion by creating universal platforms in collaboration with the Open Compute Project. Project Olympus is more than just a server standard though. It consists of a universal motherboard, power supplies, 1U and 2U server chassis, power distribution, and more. Microsoft isn’t the first company to want to go down this road, and it makes a lot of sense to cut costs by creating standards when you are buying equipment on the level of Azure.

Microsoft Distinguished Engineer Leendert van Doorn expanded on why the company is exploring this option in a blog post today. Clearly ARM has made some progress in the server world over the last few years, and Microsoft feels it’s the right time to bring some of that capability to their own datacenters. I think one of the key takeaways is that Microsoft wants to shape the hardware capabilities to the workload, and with an open platform like ARM, this can make a lot of sense for certain workloads.

Microsoft already has a version of Windows Server running on ARM, and they’ve announced that both of their partners will be demonstrating this internal use port of Windows Server, first with Qualcomm with their Centriq 2400 processor, with 48 cores on Samsung’s 10nm FinFET process. Cavium will be running on their second generation ThunderX2 platform.

The ARM platform, if properly executed, should be a good solution for some specific tasks, and if Microsoft can work with the platform makers to shape the hardware to fit specific tasks, but still be more general purpose than an ASIC, but at this time, it’s unlikely to be a serious threat to Intel’s monopoly on the datacenter at the moment. Intel has a pretty sizeable advantage in IPC, and especially on single-threaded workloads, so x86 isn’t going anywhere yet. What really matters is how Qualcomm and Cavium can execute on their platforms, and where they price them, since the end goal for Microsoft with this change is certainly, at least to some extent, to put pressure on Intel’s pricing for their datacenter equipment.

Back on the x86 side, Microsoft also had some announcements there as well. AMD will also be collaborating with Microsoft to include their Naples processor into Project Olympus, which is their new server processor based on the “Zen” architecture.